


Partridge

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 11:50:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His eyes were cold and his skin was warm, and the space between us closed over the months until his hand frequented my shoulder and hip like an extension of my own body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Partridge

The truth is that I barely remember the Christmases of my childhood. Those winters were a whirl of tiny lights and wood smoke, the silhouettes of dark trees against a bruised sky—it was a time before school started, when I was still just a curious child with springy hair that shone like honey in the firelight, and I remember that everything smelled like evergreens. On Christmas morning, my father would wake me up just as the sun was rising, when my bedroom was painted with shafts of red and gold, and he would secretly give me a chocolate orange that I could hide under my pillow before my mother came in. I hold on to these memories because they are all I have left of my parents, these fleeting images. I remember being held, being loved, and I suppose that is all that matters.

The summers of Australia are hot and drenched with sunlight. My parents live in the suburbs outside of Sydney, on a cliff that overlooks the Parramatta River, and my father has taken to growing mango trees in their yard. When my mother answers the door, she still smells like flowers and vanilla, a memory that surges forward from my childhood with a well of unshed tears. They believe that I am a distant cousin who comes to visit every Christmas.

“Hermione, dear, you look exhausted!” she says as she ushers me into the foyer. The room is painted yellow, and there are ornamental birds perched on the overgrown potted plant by the window. Their early retirement has allowed them to travel, collecting souvenirs from the far reaches of the world, and the room is eccentric and entirely alien to the practical parents of my childhood. I have occasionally added to their collection, bringing them things from our old home, secret gifts that hold meaning only to me. I see one on their mantelpiece now, the silvery Christmas tree that I transfigured for them when I was fourteen, spinning fragile branches from the metal of an old necklace that I had found at the discount shop. I can still feel the humming remnants of magic that emanate from it, though it looks much different here, shining in the midday sun, than it did in the light of our grey, rainy windows back home.

“Just the long flight, I suppose,” I say as I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror by the doorway. My eyes are rimmed in red and my face is flushed with the heat, my curls coming loose in wisps from the long plait over my shoulder. Through the rails of the stairway, I can see my father standing up, pulling off his glasses and laying a magazine down over the arm of the sofa.

“Is that Hermione?” he says. He is wearing a shirt patterned with Hawaiian flowers, and his hair is entirely grey now, but his face is younger when he sees me and smiles. My father embraces me with the familiar strong grasp of cigar smoke and aftershave, and for a moment, the weight of the world lifts from my shoulders.

**1**

I spend much of my time at the bookstore across the street from the Ministry building, where the aisles are crowded with old volumes and the wooden shelves have faded over the years. The store smells like dust and worn pages, a comforting blend that reminds me of school days spent huddled over books in the candlelit library. They have a small play area for children, and Ginny has set James down to toddle over the carpet, playing with a wooden bead maze while we browse through the extensive romance section, pulling down different titles and shaking with shared laughter as quiet as a secret. When I pull my scarf off in a whirl of melted snow, my ring catches the light, and Ginny pauses for a moment, clasping her hands together like a prayer against her chest.

“I can’t believe we’re going to be sisters in a few months,” she says, and heat rises to my cheeks unexpectedly. The tiny diamonds flicker as I turn my hand over, burying it into the folds of my scarf. The ring is small and delicate with a band like spun gold, so fragile that when Ron gave it to me almost a year ago, I felt like I was seeing a side of him that I had never known before.

“Well, it’s been a long engagement.” My voice sounds oddly hushed against the bookshelf, my fingers hovering over the cracked spines. From his place on the floor, James starts waving his tiny fists, and Ginny scoops him up with practiced ease.

“This will be your first Christmas,” she coos almost absentmindedly as she bounces her son on her hip, tickling him under the chin until he bursts out in childish laughter. “Your first Christmas . . .”

Later, we curl up in the back corner of the coffee shop next door, cradling mugs of hot chocolate and flipping idly through the stack of new paperbacks that Ginny has bought—she has an absurdly large collection that has begun to overflow from the shelves in their hallway and is now stacked at the foot of their bed. As I turn over the back cover of one, Ginny swipes some of the cream off the surface of her mug, dabbing it across James’ nose with a glowing smile. I watch them with something warm and familiar pulling at the place behind my ribs, and I think of all the evenings we have spent gathered together in their living room, watching Harry as he played with James, his happiness infectious as he relived the childhood he never had.

Through the window to the street, I watch as figures walk by in the snow, pulling their collars up against the cold. The holiday rush has begun within the past week, with people bustling in and out of the shops, pulling their children behind them as they cross the street. A couple catches my eye as they come out of the shop across the way and the woman stops to adjust her gloves. She is regal and beautiful and startlingly familiar, but for a moment, I do not recognise either of them. He appears like a shadow at the edge of my peripheral vision, a flicker of white-blond against the snow, before he says something and they continue walking, her arm linked with his, until they pass beyond the frame of the window. It happens so quickly that I don’t have time to say anything to Ginny. I suppose I wouldn’t have known what to say, anyway, and I turn back to see her watching me quietly.

“It’s strange how time passes so quickly, isn’t it?” she asks, as if she has read my mind, before she turns to brush a lock of hair off James’ forehead.

**2**

After our brief summer, we rarely ran into one another. It was a very determined sort of avoidance, but our eventual encounters were characterised by an almost painful silence that would nestle in my bones and linger for days. At some point, I heard that he had left the country, and the leaden relief that flooded through me was at once necessary and suffocating. I was able to hide my slow breakdown from everyone: from my friends, from my coworkers, even from myself. I had thought that was the end of it all, like turning the last page in a chapter of my life and being left with an unsettling feeling of closure.

It happened very slowly and simply at first. Our affair was born of a series of fraught conversations, a hatred that eventually spilled over the edge and became something altogether else. He was my darker shadow, the mirror image of a fiercely intelligent and stubborn part of myself that I rarely set free, everything that I resented and longed for at once. He was shameless and unapologetic, though I suppose I could have been his conscience if I tried. Instead, I clung to an unchanging image of him as if he were a character in a novel, an escapist fantasy of blood and bones, and in that way we never really knew one another. We became a secret. His eyes were cold and his skin was warm, and the space between us closed over the months until his hand frequented my shoulder and hip like an extension of my own body.

One morning, he caught my wrist and told me he loved me, his fingers pressing into the pulse that thrummed under my skin. I had been caught up in the roar of the rising sun and the flutter of autumn leaves outside the window of my bedroom, but in that moment everything was leached of colour and was laid bare in the stark light of day. I felt as though I were remembering something very important, something I had long forgotten. _I love you,_ he repeated, though it hung in the air like a question, the end of a conversation we had never had. As he sat there in deepening silence, I felt trapped by my own body, by the layers and layers of lies that had gathered like dust over the months, and the eventuality of it all settled somewhere inside me as I took his hands in mine.

 _You don’t,_ I told him, and that was the truth. I had already decided so.

**3**

Ron pulls me from my apartment this morning to go skating at the park. When he arrives, I am surrounded by open boxes that hold most of my worldly belongings, all of which I am slowly packing up. We are moving in together after the start of the new year, when my lease ends, and the process of wrapping everything in newspaper and labelling each box with such mundane words as _kitchenware_ and _books_ feels oddly final. I am holding a teapot painted with faded flowers, a gift my mother gave me after she was no longer my mother, and I am contemplating whether it might still fit in the box that holds all my linens, in between all the pillows and blankets.

“Do you want the ice to melt before we get there?” he says with a dry laugh, holding out my coat and mittens. Over the years, his hair has darkened to auburn and the angles of his face have sharpened. If someone had shown me a picture of him when I was a child, when I still had ideas of a fairytale prince coming to rescue me from innocent boredom, I would have thought that he was perfect. I still think that, I suppose, though I also think that he is simple and safe and entirely predictable. With Ron, my life is mapped out in shades of sunrise, a future of shared meals and children and late retirement. I expect that we might die together, and I imagine that his eyes will have the same lighthearted glimmer then as they do now. I imagine that he might turn to me and say, _You are the best decision I ever made._

The frozen pond is crowded with children, their parents watching from the edge with anticipatory thermoses and blankets. Ron pulls me out into the center and twirls me around clumsily, and I collapse against him with a breathless laugh. Soon, the muscles in my legs are burning and my nose is numb with cold, but his hand is warm and strong around mine, our rings nestled under layers of wool mittens.

“Are you going to visit your parents this year?” he says as we round the bend at the edge of the pond, and before I have a chance to answer, he pulls me down into the snow bank with a bark of laughter, and I shiver with hope and happiness as I ball up a handful of snow and shove it down the back of his sweater against his muffled protests.

“Yes,” I say when we have finally shaken off all the snow. “My flight leaves the day before Christmas Eve.”

He smiles and pulls me against him. He never asks the hard questions, never asks for more than I can give. As I look around the pond at all of the children, at the rows of lights strung in the trees, I want this to last forever for us. I want us to become like those families, like Ginny and Harry and James. I want us to raise our children in an era where we will never be forced to forget them for our own protection, where my daughter will never have to come visit me half a world away. I lean my cheek against his shoulder, and he exhales over my forehead before pressing his lips there in a soft, familiar kiss.

**4**

There are times when I wonder whether Harry might be psychic. He has a strange sort of prescience about him, something in the clear green of his eyes that reminds me of sunlight shining through treetops, and he sometimes looks at me with an intensity that makes my heart race in nervous anticipation before he blinks and the moment passes. Today, he leans against my kitchen table, legs crossed at the ankles as he stirs a mug of tea, and he waits for me to finish searching through my various folders for the assembly instructions for my desk and bookshelf. Ron is stuck at work, but Harry is always there when I need him most, and he goes about doing the heavy lifting throughout my apartment with a casual carelessness that has forever been part of his unique charm.

“Found them,” I say as I pull out a set of folded papers. He is looking outside the window of my living room, where the city is all lit up below us in a red and white blur of traffic, and he glances at me over the rims of his glasses as he raises the mug to his lips.

“It’s funny,” he says then. “I always thought that Ron would be the one to move in with you.”

He kneels down beside me on the carpet as we flip the bookshelf on its side, and he hands me the screwdriver before holding the shelves in place. The wood has been bleached by the sun in a ghostly outline of where my books used to be, and I find it strange to see my apartment so empty around us. Over the years, I have been adding to it slowly, making it a place of my own, only to pack it all up and leave it behind. I’ve had this bookshelf since I was a child—my father made it himself, staining the wood and polishing it with lemon oil until it shone brand new in the corner of my bedroom. I put it in storage with the rest of my things before I left them, that last year that we were together as a family.

“Well, this is a rental building. I suppose we want to get into the market early or . . . whatever.” I wave my hand absentmindedly.

“It’s still sad to see this place go,” he says as he focuses on pulling out a screw from the base of the shelf. “I mean, it’s very _you._ It even smells like you.”

“Really?” I laugh. “What do I smell like, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Flowers or something. Books.”

I hit him lightly on the arm, and he pulls one of the shelves out with a scandalised grin.

**5**

We met once on the banks of the river, on the cobblestone walkway by the edge of the water. It was one of those perfect late summer evenings, and when I lowered my sunglasses for a moment to look up at the sky, the blue was so deep that I felt I could fall into it forever. We had settled into a comfortable companionship by that point in our relationship, though neither of us had ever been afraid of shared silence. He never tried to hold my hand, never tried to engage in any sort of public display. We both had our own lives, our own friends and partners—we were not cheating on anyone if we simply chose to exist in a separate world, a world of sunshine and endless summer. That was what I would tell myself every time I saw him.

That day, a humid heat lingered over the city. My hair was curling around the nape of my neck, and my sundress clung limply to my thighs with every step. He walked with a very purposeful sort of nonchalance, his hands curled into his pockets, and I remember thinking it was the one thing that made him seem self-conscious.

 _I’ve been thinking about breaking up with Asteria,_ he said. It was as simple as that, as though he were talking about the weather.

_Draco . . ._

_It’s not about you,_ he said, looking out over the shimmering surface of the water. _I’ve been thinking about it for a while, even before we—I mean, it’s not because of you._

I didn’t know what he expected me to say. There was always a correct response in these sorts of situations, and I knew he had his own expectations of me, his own ideas of what I was meant to be. Maybe he wanted me to tell him that I would break up with Ron, that I would be waiting for him when he was ready. Maybe he wanted me to lie to him that way, the way I was lying to everyone else.

 _It has nothing to do with you,_ he continued. _I don’t even know why I told you._

 _Alright,_ I said, and we fell into silence.

As the sun began to set, we bought ice cream from the vendor at the base of Westminster Bridge, and we watched all the people who passed us by, all of those people caught up in their own stories. To anyone else, we could have been an ordinary couple.

 _You have . . ._ he said, before he reached over, about to run his thumb across a line of ice cream on my bottom lip. It was so sudden, so out of character for both of us, that I stopped walking and just watched him. The world around us had stilled into dusky silence, everything fading away but the imminent contact of his skin against mine. For a moment, his fingers hovered over my mouth, and he stood so close that I could have leaned forward to kiss him, until I stepped back and ran my tongue over my lips, and his gaze lingered for a moment before he let his hand drop. When he looked away, out over the water, autumn finally settled into my soul.

**6**

Ginny stuffs the pot roast into the oven with a flourish, whipping her mitts off and running a hand across her forehead. In the living room, Ron and Harry are rolling across the floor with James, involved in some sort of game that has the three of them laughing helplessly, and Ginny smiles, the corner of her mouth quirked up with the unselfconscious wonder of all parents. We join them and sit at the edge of the couch, watching as Ron swings James up into the air and twirls him around.

“He’ll make a good father someday,” Ginny says quietly from beside me, and I swallow the inexplicable tension, the burn of tears that has lodged itself in my throat.

“Yes,” I murmur. “He will, won’t he?”

She squeezes my shoulder before standing and disappearing back into the kitchen, and I clasp my hands together over my knees. For a moment, a very different picture flashes before my eyes: I am walking by the side of a river, holding the hand of a child with curly hair and grey eyes, and everything is perfect in the world.

“Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?”

I turn to see Ron sitting beside me on the couch. His cheeks are flushed and his hair is flattened on one side from where he was lying on the carpet, and he reaches over to take my hand in his.

“Where were you off to, just now?” he asks.

“Nowhere important,” I hum, and I look over to where Harry is tossing a cloth Snitch back and forth with his son. “I am looking forward to it. I just want to make sure they’re . . . happy, I suppose.”

When I look back at Ron, he is watching me with something like courage flickering across his features. He runs his palm over the side of my face, stroking his thumb across my cheek, and I close my eyes in a long blink as I lean into his touch.

“I love you no matter what, you know that?” he says.

“I . . . do know that. Ron, of course I know that.”

“No, Hermione, I mean—Well, I love you.” He drops his hand and closes it around mine, nestled together in my lap. After a moment, we both turn away to watch the happy family that will one day be our own.

Later, we all exchange our gifts before we part for the night. My flight will leave early the next morning, and James clings to my leg with a wordless goodbye as his mother kisses me on the cheek and his father pulls me into a familiar embrace. These are my Christmas memories, I realise, as I step into the fire and watch them whirl away in the flames behind me. My apartment is oddly quiet in contrast, my suitcase sitting packed at the foot of my bed and my various boxes scattered throughout the empty rooms. As I drift off into sleep, I think of my friends, and my family, and the child I will never meet.

**7**

We stopped seeing one another on a morning at the end of summer. It was very fast, like tearing off a plaster and exposing the underlying wound, still bleeding and raw, to the cold. I was stepping out of the shower when I heard the knock on my front door, and for a moment everything inside me echoed with fear, then hope, then resignation. It was six thirty in the morning, and the building was silent except for the sound of water rushing through the pipes, and the tree outside my window cast flickering patterns through the rain and over the wall. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my eyes were shining in the light of dawn, my skin still glistening with droplets of water.

I pulled on my clothes and waited one long moment before I opened the door to find him standing there. He must have been running his fingers through his hair, the strands pushed away from his forehead, and his eyes were shadowed in the grey darkness of the doorway.

 _I’m sorry,_ he said. _I can’t do this anymore._

It felt nothing like I had expected it would. I had expected tears, a wrenching pain, anything but the numbness that buried itself deep inside me. I pressed my hand to the bottom of my ribs and inhaled, my eyes wide. I wondered whether I was in shock. He reached out to touch my shoulder, and I pulled myself away.

 _What do you want from me?_ he said.

 _Nothing,_ I choked out. _I don’t want anything from you. I don’t need anything from you._

 _I need something from you,_ he said. _But it’s not something you’re willing to give._

_Please . . ._

_Don’t,_ he said. _Don’t beg. I don’t want you like that._

He watched me as my fingers curled against my skin, feeling the rush of heartbeat and breath and life. For a moment, I remembered walking by the river. I remembered our brief summer, our mistake that could have changed everything or nothing.

 _We could have had . . . something beautiful,_ I said. It was not a plea—it was something entirely different, like a shared memory shimmering in the sunlight. He looked away before he nodded, his head angled downwards.

 _Is this it?_ he asked, and I started to say something else before cutting myself off, feeling my face twisting into something desperate. His hand was warm against my cheek, and I closed my eyes. I wanted to etch this memory onto my soul forever, this last perfect moment before my life would split into two paths, before and after, and everything to come would be like looking across a chasm that I could never cross again. I stood there with my eyes closed, and he kissed me coldly, briefly, before he was gone.

**8**

My parents’ new house smells like oil paints and flowers. This is the first thing I realise as I wake up, wrapped in a light layer of sheets altogether unlike my nest of blankets back in England. My mother has become somewhat of an artist, and she hangs her pieces in every available inch of space on the walls—in their guest bedroom, where I sleep, the wall beside the window is covered in landscapes, all bright colours and sunlight, all unlike the practical mother who raised me. Time has changed us all, I think, as I pull back the sheets and stretch, basking in the light of the rising sun through the curtains.

There is a light knock at the door, and my father pokes his head into the room. “Hermione, are you awake?”

“Come in—Uncle Wendell,” I answer. Over the years, I have stopped slipping up, stopped almost calling him _Dad,_ but for a moment, I remember the Christmases of my childhood, remember my father waking me up early every morning, and I catch myself on an inhale.

He steps into the room, carrying something in his hands, and he comes to join me where I’m standing by the window, looking out over the river and the flock of birds that take off across the water. “You’re quite the little bird yourself, aren’t you?” he says with a smile. “Flying south for the winter.”

I laugh quietly, careful not to wake up my mother. After only seven years, his accent has already begun to change, picking up something of the clipped drawl of Sydney. For a moment, he seems to pause before he holds his hand out to me.

“You know, when Monica and I were younger, there was a little girl who used to come visit us for Christmas,” he says. “She might have been—maybe the child of a friend? I can’t recall.”

I fight back the burn of tears in my throat as I look down into his palm, where he is cradling a chocolate orange like the ones he would give me all those years ago, the ones I would secret away under my pillow.

“Well,” he says, “you remind me of her, and she used to love these.”

I clasp it between both my hands, breathing in until I can trust myself to speak. “Uncle Wendell, that’s—it’s very thoughtful.”

“Oh, think nothing of it,” he says, clapping me lightly on the shoulder. “Now, I’m going to wake Monica, and we’ll have ourselves a proper Christmas breakfast.”

I nod as he turns to leave, and when I am sure he is no longer looking, I press my lips to the aluminium wrapper and close my eyes, letting the passage of time wash over me. As I look out towards the rising sun, I think for a moment about the future, all the things that have yet to happen. One day, I will have my own child, and perhaps I will wake her up early on Christmas mornings and tell her about her grandparents, who are off having adventures across the world. I think about my family here and my family waiting for me back home, and I think of all the love I have lost and all the love I have yet to know. I think of a man with red hair and strong arms, the man who will one day be the father of my children. I think of my two best friends and their son, of the happiness that they have grown between them like a garden in full bloom. And I think of the man who lingers in me like a ghost, the fleeting reflection of white-blond in the sunlight and the echo of heartbeat against my skin.

I remember being loved, and I suppose that is all that matters.


End file.
